Carbon Monitoring System Applications Framework: Lessons Learned from Stakeholder Engagement Activities

The NASA Carbon Monitoring System initiated by U.S. Congress in 2010 is developing products that characterize and quantify carbon sources and sinks in the United States and the global tropics. In 2013, an applications effort was selected to engage potential end users and gather feedback about their data needs. For the past four years the CMS applications efforts has expanded and implemented a number of strategies to connect carbon scientists to decision-makers, contributing to the societal benefits of CMS data products. The applications efforts use crowd sourcing to collects feedback from stakeholders on challenges and lessons learned in the use of CMS data products. Some of the most common data needs from engaged organizations include above and below-ground biomass and fluxes in forestlands and wetlands, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all land use/cover and land use changes. Stakeholder organizations' needs for CMS data products support national GHG inventories following the Paris Agreement, carbon markets, and sub-national natural resources management and policies. The lessons learned report presents stakeholder specific applications, challenges, and successes from using CMS data products. To date, the most common uses of CMS products include: conservation efforts, emissions inventory, forestry and land cover applications, and carbon offset projects. The most common challenges include: the need for familiar and consistent products over time, budget constraints, and concern with uncertainty of modeled results. Recurrent recommendations from stakeholder indicate that CMS should provide high resolution (30m) and frequent data products updates (annually). The applications efforts have also helped identified success stories from different CMS projects, including the development of the GHG emissions inventory from Providence, RI, the improvement of the U.S. GHG Inventory though the use of satellite data, and the use of high resolution canopy cover maps for forestry, conservation, and ecosystem services applications in the tristate area of Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. The presentation will discuss the applications framework methodology and strategy, as well as highlight some of the results and lessons learned from these applications efforts.